


Man With A Plan

by NyxEtoile, OlivesAwl



Series: Tales From the Tower: The Next Generation [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Musicals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-20 04:43:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyxEtoile/pseuds/NyxEtoile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/OlivesAwl/pseuds/OlivesAwl
Summary: "So I got a really weird call yesterday," Darcy said appearing in his apartment one morning. "A Broadway playwright wants a meeting with you.”Steve was in the middle of making waffles, all three kids at the the island counter. “With me? About what?”"He says he wants to talk to you about updating the Captain America musical.”





	Man With A Plan

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little Grown Up ficlet to set up the next story.

When Steve was under the ice, someone had made a musical about his life. It had been a smash hit, and also terribly inaccurate and a product of its time. Then the sixties happened, and that kind of silly, brightly colored patriotism fell out of fashion anyway. A revival had been staged on Broadway in the 90’s for the 50th anniversary of World War II. That was the source of the bootleg tape Amanda had, and the soundtrack she occasional tormented Steve and Bucky with.

After the Battle of New York, there had been a move to make it into a movie, something Steve really, really did not want. Intellectual Property laws didn’t quite know what to do with a man who’d come back from the dead, and eventually the movie studio with the rights sold them to Stark rather than spend years fighting the lawyers Tony had threatened to throw at them. 

Eventually they acquired full ownership rights that allowed Steve to prevent anyone from staging it. Which he did, until Amanda convinced him to let schools put it on. 

But under absolutely no circumstances would there be a professional production. He wasn’t going to let someone make a profit off a completely wrong interpretation of his life.

"So I got a really weird call yesterday," Darcy said appearing in his apartment one morning. "A Broadway playwright wants a meeting with you.”

He was in the middle of making waffles, all three kids at the the island counter. “With me? About what?”

"He says he wants to talk to you about updating the Captain America musical.”

He opened the waffle maker, and pried out the waffle inside. He gave each kid ¼ of it, and took a bite of the remaining quarter. “No way.”

The door opened and Sharon came in, sweaty from her morning run. They took their runs in shifts once the kids got too big to push in strollers. “Morning. Hi Darcy.”

"Hi Sharon, your husband hates the theater."

She arched a brow at Steve. "What did you do?”

“Someone wants to put on the Cap musical and I said no. Like I always do.”

"He didn't say put on, he said update. I got the vibe he wanted to rewrite it."

Sharon went to the fridge and dug for a drink. "Some random guy called about writing a Cap musical?"

"I guess he's written other stuff?" Darcy glanced down at her notes. "Said his name was Jan Sebastian Acosta."

The fridge rattled as Sharon straightened. "Wait, seriously?”

Steve poured more batter in the waffle maker. “You know the name?”

"Yeah, he wrote that hip-hop musical about Thomas Jefferson a couple years ago. Amanda listened to it non-stop, it won a bunch of Tonys. I have a couple of the songs on my running list." She took a swig of OJ from the bottle. "You should talk to him.”

He made a face. “The Cap musical is too terrible to be saved. I know Amanda likes the songs. But it’s a racist and sexist mess, 90’s cleanup or not.” Amanda’s bootleg still featured Peggy the Secretary, though the original production had featured a nicely whitewashed Lt. Morris, and portrayed Jones as a servant. He looked up at Darcy. “The 1954 national tour cast contained a contained a man in blackface.”

Sharon took another drink. " _Jefferson_ contains an entire song about the hypocrisy of writing 'all men are created equal' while owning slaves. Sally Hemmings is a major character and calls him her rapist."

Darcy now had her phone out and was clearly researching something. "Acosta's musical before _Jefferson_ was about the experience of Latino immigrants in New York city. The cast did not contain a single white person."

"You want your story told the right way?" Sharon asked. "This might be your guy.”

He looked from one to the other and sighed. “I’ll take a meeting. That’s all I’m promising.”

"I will let him know," Darcy said brightly.

Sharon kissed his cheek. "Just keep an open mind.”

The meeting was scheduled for the following week. He gave Bucky a heads up, in case he had any objections, or wanted to be there. Approximately twenty minutes later Amanda pounced on him.

"I need to be in your meeting with Jan Sebastian Acosta.”

He blinked at her urgent tone. “You do?”

"Yes." She was damn near vibrating with energy. "Please? Pleasepleaseplease?"

“I don’t think you were this excited at your own wedding,” Steve said.

"Jan Sebastian Acosta was not at my wedding."

Steve's phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out to glance at it. _My wife is about to tackle you. Beware._

 _Too late,_ he texted back before looking back at Amanda. “Are you going to try and talk me into agreeing to this thing?”

"Probably. Mostly I want to meet him and bask in his awesome. Let me attend or I will make your next physical supremely uncomfortable."

“You’d have made a great villain, you know that?”

"You all use past tense when you say that. I've got time."

“It’s Tuesday at 4:30,” he said with a sigh.

"Thank you," she sing songed, giving his shoulder a little pat.

She was waiting in the room already when he got there on Tuesday. “Sharon’s running late.”

"Are we going to be the angel and the devil on your shoulder? Which am I?"

“I assumed you were just going to shriek, fan yourself, and faint.”

Amanda usually prickled at the inference she was a human with emotions, but she just shrugged. "I mean, that's a possibility."

Steve sat in one of the chairs. “Should I have FRIDAY keep Tess on standby?”

"I'm sure Sharon knows some basic first aid."

He shook his head. Sharon arrived a few minutes later and sat beside him. “FRIDAY said he’s on his way up.”

Amanda straightened, hands folded in her lap. Sharon looked over at her, amused. "You developed a treatment cure for cerebral palsy. You've met three presidents and numerous kings. And this guy engages your fan girl."

"We all have our heroes, Sharon."

The door opened and Darcy came in with a trim Latino man in jeans and a t-shirt, sporting a Tony-worthy goatee; obviously their guest based on the way Amanda turned. Steve stood up and held out his hand. “Steve Rogers. This is my wife, Sharon, and Amanda Newbury-Barnes.”

Acosta shook their hands, and when he held his out to Amanda he said, “I didn’t think I’d get to meet Doc.”

"I'm a _huge_ fan," she said and it was only because he knew her so well that Steve could detect the little tremor in her voice. "I saw _Jefferson_ three times during its initial run. And I caught _Harding Park_ when it was still off Broadway."

"Amanda is our resident theater buff," Sharon added.

He grinned. “I’m a huge fan,” he replied. “My mother had ALS. She’s alive because of you.”

Amanda made a little squeaking noise that Steve made a mental note to tell Bucky about. But she managed to sit with dignity as Acosta took his seat and pulled a laptop out of his bag. "Thank you for meeting with me," he said, directing it at Steve. "I appreciate you hearing me out."

“Have you _seen_ the Cap musical?” Steve asked.

He grinned again. He did that a lot, it made him look younger. Steve didn't think it was an act, though, just that he was a genuinely happy, open-book kind of guy. "I have. I was Colonel Philips in my high school production."

“You can’t save it. It should be nuked from orbit.” He held up a finger to Amanda. “Even if you like the songs.”

"I play them mostly because it annoys you," she retorted.

"I'm not sure 'save' is the word for what I'm hoping to do," Acosta said. "I'm thinking more. . . wiping off the grease paint and showing the grit underneath." He opened his laptop up and clicked a few things. "Last summer, my wife and I went to Europe on vacation for a month. I picked up a couple of World War II books to take. Get into the atmosphere, get some ideas on where to visit, that sort of thing. I ended up grabbing a book written by the daughter of one of the USO girls that worked on your tour, based on her mother's experiences. It was fascinating. So when I got home, I started reading everything I could. About you, about the Commandos. And I remembered the musical I was in in high school. I got a copy of the soundtrack and I wrote this over a couple of sleepless, coffee high nights." He hit a button and a the opening bars of "Star Spangled Man" started.

Steve winced and braced himself. Then the music slowed, a heavy beat took over for the bright brass. It stopped being a cheery patriotic march and started being the sort of thing men on a fifty mile slog would hum. When Acosta's voice came in with the lyrics - reordered and edited to work with the new beat - it was barely recognizable as the old song.

It wasn’t until he started spending so much time with Eli that Steve got to appreciate rap music—Sharon teased him he had Old Fart music tastes. The lyrics were dense and fast, painting the sort of grim and brutal picture of war that made the start of the song sound ridiculous in contrast. It reminded him of standing on that stage doing his Dancing Monkey routine for an audience of battle-weary troops on the front and feeling like an asshole while doing it. The glossy, patriotic war of the home front crashing into terrible reality. Captain America vs. Captain Rogers. All in 3 or 4 minutes of song.

When it ended, Acosta let the silence settle a moment before speaking. "You're right, the old musical is. . . kind of terrible. It's a product of its time. Racist, sexist. Patronizing. It paints the war with bright red-white-and-blue and the audience gets so blinded and over saturated they don't think about it too hard. I think you, and your story, is better than that. I want to tell that story. If you give me the rights to the old musical, I can use the lyrics and tunes to really play up the contrast." He paused. "And, I'd like to do the second act in the present day, at the forming of the Avengers. As near as I can tell, those two events were about a month apart for you. I'd like to bring that to the audience's attention. Show how the world must have seemed like a big, endless cycle."

“The world kind of is a big endless cycle.” But it had seemed particularly bad back then. Mostly he was still running on autopilot in those days. Not that he would have known that word. He leaned his arms on the table. “You should take it until the fall of SHIELD. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t until after that that my life really… started again. My life in this century.” He looked up. “And it was 16 days.”

With a nod, Acosta did something on his computer and took notes. "I don't know if you know anything about _Jefferson_ , but we had actors who played one role in the first act play a parallel or opposite role in the second. I wanted to do the same here. Have the Commandos become the Avengers."

“There are a surprising number of parallels. A well fitting team requires a certain mix of personalities.”

"Obviously, other than giving my the rights, you don't have to have anything to do with this. But I would love to pick your brain as I work on it. There's only so much I can get from books." He grinned and looked over at him. "If Jefferson was still alive I'd have driven him nuts."

“I’ll help,” Steve said quietly. “Seems a worthy cause. It’s possible Bucky might—”

“James will help,” Amanda said immediately, before Steve could even finish his sentence.

"And you were doing so well," Sharon teased. Amanda hushed her and she looked back at Acosta. "Darcy and I will talk to the rest of the team, make sure you get what you need to use their names and likenesses. I'm sure most if not all of them will let you ask some questions as well."

“I have contact information for the Commandos’ families, I can reach out and see what they think. Dugan and Jones went on to work for SHIELD. Morita pilfered my sketchbook and letters and hid them from the army after I went into the ice. I know Monty kept a diary during the war, though I don’t know if it survived. They were close-lipped while alive, mostly to protect me, but their kids might talk to you if I ask.”

"Any wheels you can grease I appreciate. Thank you," Acosta added sincerely.

Steve nodded. “I really liked the song.”

He grinned wider than he had all day. "I think that's the best review I ever had."


End file.
